Modernity and Its Discontents

Term:
Fall 2009

Subject Code:
GLIB

Course Number:
6315

An introduction to Liberal Studies at The New School for Social Research, this seminar brings new students together to explore a variety of themes and texts that epitomize some of the critical concerns of our age. Among the issues discussed are freedom and the problem of progress; the end of slavery and the implications of European world domination; new views of human nature; the idea of the avant-garde; and the moral implications of modern war and totalitarianism. Among the authors read are Rousseau, Kant, Goethe, Robespierre, Condorcet, Olaudauh Equiano, Hegel, Marx, Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, Freud, Darwin, Ernst Junger, Georg Lukacs, Marinetti, Andre Breton, Tadeusz Borowski, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault. (Seminar, limited to 25 students.) Cross listed with Political Science.